Just a quick post. When virtual machine cannot get DHCP IP address the first thing you want to check is firewall. Whatever Windows firewall or physical firewall. You should make sure UDP port 67 and 68 are not blocked. Otherwise you will see the virtual machine gets 169.x.x.x IP address only.

The two ports is required for DHCP client to query IP addresses. The methodology is introduced in RFC document.

DHCP uses UDP as its transport protocol. DHCP messages from a client
to a server are sent to the ‘DHCP server’ port (67), and DHCP
messages from a server to a client are sent to the ‘DHCP client’ port
(68). A server with multiple network address (e.g., a multi-homed
host) MAY use any of its network addresses in outgoing DHCP messages.

You may see ‘Adobe Flash Player Out of Date’ on Chrome when you open vSphere Web Client. Click the text Chrome will update Flash Player automatically. But in some cases it doesn’t work due to maybe your Chrome is controlled by company policy or internet problem to Adobe.com. I found an article to show how to offline fix the issue. You can download Flash Player for Opera and Chromium-based browsers – PPAPI in official Adobe KB article.

You may also want to check out my other articles about Flash issue on browsers.

Slight network latency may cause application problem on sensitive virtual machines. Even the network responding time is just 3 or 7 ms. There is a way to improve the stability of responding latency – Enable RSS on NIC.

Network traffic is handled by single CPU core when RSS is disabled. Enable it will distribute the workload to 4 cores by default. You can increase CPU for RSS by change registry.

If your company implemented firewall and blocked public NTP server, you may see installation of vRealize Operation Manager pending on ./install.sh on console. That’s because the installer tries to negotiate with NTP server http://www.iana.org. The firewall blocked the traffic.

VMware TAM Manager Shan told me there are two options on firewall to block traffic: REJECT and DROP. REJECT means firewall responding to the request and let source device knows it’s rejected. DROP means firewall immediately ignores the request and no responding to source device. Looks like there is a bug in vROPs code that it hung if NTP request gets drop and no responding.

The workaround is create a port group without physical uplinks and install vRealize Operation Manager. Then move it to proper network after installation is completed. You can configure correct IP addresses when import the OVF file so later on you just need simply move the network.